One of our big drives over the last eighteen months has been to develop and improve home-school links, and to support that we've tried hard to provide more suggestions, resources and guidance to support home learning. Below you will find a list of school-wide approaches that we use (along with links to all the relevant sites and portals), while further down the page you will find class-specific information, linked to current topics and learning:

• Children in Nursery, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 all have daily phonics sessions. We follow the ReadWriteInc scheme, and they have lots of guidance on how you can support your child with phonics at home here.  
• Nursery and Reception use Tapestry to share work that children have done in school and share ideas for learning beyond school. Again, speak to your child's teacher if you're not sure about how to log in. 
• Children in Years 2-6 bring home weekly spellings to learn - these are drawn from a combination of spelling patterns that children are working on in class and common exception words (which do not fit regular patterns) for their age group. Click here for guidance on useful strategies you can use to support your child in learning their spellings.  
• Keeping fit, happy and healthy is always important. There are links to lots of great resources and workouts to help everyone in the family get active at www.sportengland.org/get-moving
• Finally, one of the simplest and most powerful ways you can support your child's learning every day is by hearing them read and reading to them. Our guide on how to make the most of this is available here.   

Years 1 and 2

• Keep on practicing counting whenever and wherever you can - how many cars are there in the street? How many trees in the field? How many trollies in the supermarket, players on the team or stairs on the way to bed? Our focus is on numbers from 10-20 this term, so things that come in groups of this size are ideal for counting practice. 
• In history, we are looking at the history of flight, so it would be great if you could share memories of any flights you have been on in the past. What were the planes like? Where did you go? What was the journey like? If older family members have memories of what flights were like 40 or 50 years ago, that’d really help!
  
• Visit the air museums at Shuttleworth, Duxford or Hendon to see first-hand how planes have changed over the last 100 years.
  
• Throughout the year we are exploring how our environment changes with the seasons. You could build on this at home in lots of ways - exploring the park, making maps or looking for signs of winter (and, later in the term, the start of spring) on the way to and from school. How do different animals change their behaviour as the seasons change? 
• Practice reciting the days of the week and months of the year in order - saying them is great; learning to spell a few of them would be even better! 

Years 3 and 4

• Each week we are set spellings to learn. Click here for guidance on strategies you can use to support your child in learning these at home. 
• In history this term we are learning about the Ancient Egyptians, which provides lots of opportunities for learning beyond the classroom - try investigating the history, and making a picture or model of an Egyptian pyramid. There's lots of information, video and links to get you started available on the BBC Bitesize website.
  
• If you’re looking for something to do one weekend, the British Museum is free to visit and has a large collection of Egyptian statues, mummies and jewellery - find out more at britishmuseum.org.
• Explore sounds you can make around the house by tapping bottles, table tops or toys. What links are there between the material and the sound produced? Or try making a cup and string telephone, and talk about how the sound is being transmitted - there are helpful instructions available here.
• You can have a go at coding in Scratch by heading to scratch.mit.edu or downloading the Scratch app. There are loads and loads of tutorials, ideas and examples of other people’s work available on the Scratch site.
  
• It’s Safer Internet Day on February 11th, so this is a good opportunity for us all to talk about the way that we stay safe online. This year’s focus is on avoiding online scams - you can find our more at saferinternet.org.uk/
• Start learning times tables facts - in Year 3, 2x, 10x, 5x and then 3x tables would be a great place to start. In Year 4, we're aiming to know all our facts by heart by the end of the year.